


Modern Semi Furnished 2 Bedroom Apartment Close to Westfield Strat

by viggorlijah



Category: Attack the Block (2011)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-11
Updated: 2016-01-11
Packaged: 2018-05-13 04:29:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,608
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5694766
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/viggorlijah/pseuds/viggorlijah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam wants to keep him safe. It's not pity or kindness. She needs to. He matters to her. She doesn't want to think too closely why.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Modern Semi Furnished 2 Bedroom Apartment Close to Westfield Strat

Brewis does donate to Amnesty International, but that turns out to be far less important than his uncle being a local MP and Tia uploading video of the police shoving Brewis into the back of a van faster than the police can confiscate her phone. 

Gangland murders are dull, but throw in drug-fuelled alien-raving gangland murders with an ex-Eton nephew dripping blood and his uncle yelling at the journalists on his doorstop, and it takes two days for the block to be shut down. 

That's what they call it when they come round, very polite and calm people in plain ordinary clothes, Marks & Spencers suits, nothing too expensive or too cheap. Scuffed shoes and no weapons. Mild faces and clipboards. They turn up with vans and miles of bubblewrap and packing tape, and they make tea and produce packed lunches from Greggs and suddenly the block is emptying of people. 

Not everyone. Plenty of people stay put, their doors firmly locked. There's a blue sticker with a number next to those doors and the people walk by without talking, shaking their heads about gangland violence. They've replaced all the lights in the corridors with daylight tubes and put a fresh coat of paint up. Soft beige. It's almost pleasant, if it didn't still smell slightly wrong. 

The lifts had to be replaced at night. 

Other people move. They get council houses, "Two up, two down, and it's next to my sister's," Mrs Higgson says as her sofa is carried down the stairs and packed into the removals. "I'll have a garden again."

Sam is offered an apartment around the corner from her hospital. It's not council housing, but the woman sitting on her couch says there are special circumstances and they have additional units for single people. 

She looks at the shattered window in her flat and thinks about how she stood there last night, against the edge of the open window and felt almost as though she would fall and wondered what it would be like to fall, to fall and have no-one watching, no-one praying and hoping you would be caught.

"I want a two bedroom," she says. 

\--

Moses transfers to a new school. He doesn't want to, but he can't go back to his old school the quiet woman with the clipboard says when Sam signs the paperwork for the new flat. Sam wasn't photographed by the press and no-one at her hospital really knows her. But everyone knows Moses now. 

There's an argument and Sam's losing, when the woman stands up and says politely that she would like a cup of tea and when she comes back, trying to think how to convince him that this is the right choice, that this is what he needs, that it's not pity, it's not kindness, it's - Moses is signing paperwork, his back to her. 

The woman drinks the tea and then she leaves. 

"What did she say?" Sam asks in the silence afterwards.

Moses is sorting through the papers left behind, a pile for her, a pile for him, a shared pile. She's not his guardian, but she's got medical proxy and she can sign him in and out at school, and a hundred dizzying rights that his uncle - she hasn't met him, she's beginning to think he isn't even real, but that makes her chest ache so she tries not to think that - has signed over. He doesn't look at her when he answers. "Said she'd get the others put into care if I didn't agree. And get you fired. And I'd go to army. I'm sixteen now, so they can do that."

She can't breathe and she thinks it's panic and then realises it's rage. She's half-risen from her chair and her hands are in fists and then Moses is next to her, pushing her back down. "S'alright," he says. "New school, new start."

"They can't - they can't threaten you like that, Moses."

He looks her in the eye, and his face is calm. "Yes, they can. They moved half the block out in a week and shut down all the news about an alien invasion. They didn't kill us or wipe our memories or whatever they do. They just want us to keep our heads down and not talk."

"This is wrong," she says. Her throat hurts. Her eyes are hot and stinging. 

He looks at her closely, then shrugs and goes back to the piles of papers. "Who the fuck said it would be right?"

\--

Moses goes to school. She goes to work. They see each other in passing, notes on the fridge or text messages. He's surprisingly easy to live with, once she gets him wireless headphones for his awful music and they agree on pizza twice a week. There's money banked into her account every week from the government and she opens a savings account for him. "College, or travel or something," she tells him. "You can access it when you're 21."

"It'll be drugs and a car then," he says cheerfully. 

"Your choice," she says. "You should get to choose." 

Her parents call every now and then. She hasn't told them that she's living with Moses, only that she moved and to send her mail to the hospital because her address is difficult. She's not sure why, except she doesn't want her mother to meet Moses. She doesn't want anyone to meet Moses, she realises one day when Tim, another nurse at the hospital who she's been steadily flirting with for weeks asks if he can come over and watch the Bake-Off finale with her. "No, I can't - I have someone at home," she says and Tim's face shutters. 

It's easier not to correct him. It's easier when it gets around the hospital that she's living with someone. Living with someone. Not mothering a 17 year old orphan. But living with him. 

Tia comes over, the girls from the block trailing after her. They like the apartment and they like Sam a little. The other boys come, and then other kids from the new school. Every other day, there's a teenager or a troop of them in her apartment, sitting at her kitchen table talking in low urgent voices to Moses, or sprawled out on her couch playing games on the console Moses got for his 17th birthday. 

And then sometimes, it's been a night shift and she wakes up in the afternoon and Moses is back from school and they sit in the living room, Sam with her tea and Moses with his latest project - something with wires and bits of fuses all neatly labelled and spread out on a box - across the table and talk. 

"Look," he says holding up the finished beeping box, "it works." Then it explodes in spluttering dusty bits and Sam laughs and Moses laughs and the scars, the three lines by his face, pull up in a way that make his smile so dear and familiar that she catches her breath at the beauty of his face, happy and safe in their home. 

\--

The woman comes back when Moses is almost eighteen. He has a full weekend planned with Pest and Biggz, and Sam has overheard enough that she has booked double shifts so she won't spent the whole time worrying about their stupid teenage arses. 

But that seems wonderfully naive when the woman comes in, neatly dressed in navy pinstripes now and with a tablet in her hand, not a clipboard. There's a man with her, spectacled with wavy hair and another tablet. And a small machine that goes beep when he waves it up and down Moses' body. Literally beep-beep-beep. It's a fucking Monty Python machine, and Sam who showed the whole series to Moses when he got the flu one long miserable week, asks him if he has one that goes ping, and they begin to laugh, helplessly. 

"Finished?" the woman says.

Sam nods, still giggling slightly except now it's beginning to turn into crying. And then she feels Moses take her hand and his palm is warm and solid against hers, his fingers threaded through hers, squeezing softly. "Yes," she says. "What do you want?"

They want Moses. They also want her. There's a lot of talk about army and aliens, and Sam has to stop Moses from signing the paperwork immediately at that, but it turns out that the attack on the block is not the first attack, and it won't be the last. And that Moses was really good. And so was she. 

"Most civilians just die," the woman said. "The survival rate is generally about 10%. You two kept the survival rate at 95% for your block."

"It was luck," Moses mutters.

The man runs the beeping machine up and down Moses and up and down Sam. It tingles and she tightens her grip on Moses' hand. His thumb rubs circles against her wrist reassuringly. 

"Possibly," the woman says. "This is an alien artifact and while we don't know what it measures, it tends to respond well to people who are effective against aliens. It is responding well to both of you. Moses in particular but medical training is a plus."

Then she has to stop Moses from trying to take apart the alien artifact and it's another hour of paperwork and somehow they have a folder with passports and plane tickets and there's luggage - "Packed, your sizes, you can go through it later" - and in four days they have tickets to Nevada, United States. 

"Area 51," Moses says quietly. "Area fucking fifty fucking one."

Sam is sitting on the couch trying not to throw up. She just signed over her life to the government to fight aliens. She just signed over Moses' life. He's not even eighteen yet. 

"I shouldn't have done that," she says and bursts into tears.

Moses is there trying to hug her or pat her - they've lived together for nearly two years now but rarely touch for some unspoken reason (she knows why but she doesn't think about why Moses who hugs everyone, who fistbumps and shoulderchecks, who drapes arms around people, who gentles with his hands and presses kisses to cheeks, to the corners of lips, who touches and touches all the time, never touches her, always moves lightly past as though there was a magnetic pushback between the two of them) and it's awful, she's crying in messy gulping heaves and getting tears and snot on the shoulder of his jumper and trying to explain that he's going to be eighteen and he should be going to college and girlfriends and having choices, she wants him to have choices, because she loves him so much -

And when Sam says that and Moses looks at her with such hope in his eyes, she knows she is the worst and most despicable person in the world, because two years ago, she fell in love with the boy who saved her life and now he's fallen in love with her. 

And when he touches her, she wants to stop him and push him off and rip up those papers that will bind him to her even closer - to tell him to go. 

But when he kisses her, his eyes flutter shut and his lashes are so long and she has watched him sleep and seen him in restless nightmares and ached to smooth his brow, to touch his face and her hand rises and she does and he makes a sound that is her name and Sam kisses him.

There is his back, his shoulders to touch and feel. There is his waist to span, her fingers to slide under the band of his boxers and then to put her hands over the curve of his back to go down and grip, to pull him against her harder where she wants, where she needs. He pushes and she pulls, and then it's shoving down his jeans and she has to fumble with the button on her jeans and his hands are deft and stronger. Then his fingers run up her ribs and stop at her bra and he pushes up her t-shirt, and cups her breasts, thumbs her nipples through her bra and begins to grind against her in a steady sweetly building pace. 

She hooks one ankle over his leg to shift him closer, to push back and it's not quite enough and she wants more but he runs his hands up her chest, her neck and through her hair until he's almost lying across her. He's almost entirely touching her, kissing her in tiny brief kisses, one hand pushing down his boxers, then another pushing down her jeans and trapping her thighs in a tangle, pushing aside her underwear and finding her wet, and then pushing into her. The angle is so shallow that it's not enough and she swears, frantic to move and Moses laughs and kisses her and pushes in a little more and his face stills in pleasure and she looks at him and thinks "I love him, I love him so much, I gave him this."

She moves and then they're moving together and it doesn't matter that they're both still half-dressed or not entirely fucking. They're close enough, wet enough and he's on top of her and she's kissing him and he fucks into her and she feels him stutter and come and she bites at his neck and she comes afterwards, but she wants more. 

She turns him over under her and he's out, so she takes his hand and tells him "please, please" and he bends around her and fucks her with his mouth on her throat, her breasts and then licking back into her mouth to kiss her again when she comes clenching around his fingers. 

She falls against him and he's laughing a little and running his sticky fingers against her back and unhooking her bra so he can run his hands over her freed breasts, and Sam whispers "you're not even eighteen yet."

She should get up and leave. She should sign out of the program and let him have the aliens and Area 51. Except when she thinks of leaving Moses, when she thinks of going anywhere else in her life, of life without Moses - she can't. 

Two years ago she was a new nurse who had moved to London to escape over-protective parents and had an on-off boyfriend from uni and thought of travelling a bit. Now, all she wants to do is be someone in Moses' life. Someone he needs. Maybe someone he could love someday. 

She would be his fucking tea-lady if she knew it would keep him safe, and yet selfishly she couldn't even leave him when that's the best thing for him. 

She's completely fucked him up. She's a fucking - she's despicable. He's an orphaned teenager and she's a grown woman, and she just - 

"Sam," he says. "Sam, come here," and he wraps her in his arms and pulls her down against him so she can hear his heart beating in his chest. 

"This is wrong," she says, muffled against the warmth of his skin.

"I know you're not my mum," he says. "You're not my sister." He tilts her head up and she looks at him and wonders what he sees - "You're my Sam," he says, and she lets out a breath she didn't know she was holding. 

"Sam," he says again, and she puts her arms around his neck and answers his name, and touches his face with soft reverent hands and he kisses her fingertips and draws her close again.


End file.
